The plant is having hiccups. Rogo is no longer the plant manager and has to help at a higher level. This chapter lacks the ‘aha’ moments that have driven the cadence of the book until now. It seems our author, Goldratt, wants to have the reader leave the book with a sense of having survived a socratic education system. Goldratt doesn’t want to have a, “happily ever after” resolution for Rogo – that would be contradictory to his goal in writing the book.

Highlights

“We’re reacting rather than planning.”

Time spent planning is rarely wasted. Futile paths can be identified. Knowledge can be shared. Unknowns can be highlighted and addressed.

Plan, plan, plan.

Page by Page

P319 – “I told you that those indicators are based on local optimum and that they have nothing to do with the global picture.”

Yes, you’ve told them – but have they learned it for themselves?

P320 – “Alex, I think that we simply accepted more orders than we can process.”

Problems can have many origins.

P321 – “It is obvious that we tried to swallow more than we can chew.”

Just because something is obvious doesn’t mean that it is the only source of a problem.

P322 – “From time to time the bottlenecks are starved. Then the work comes to them in a big wave.”

P323 – “We wanted three days’ inventory in front of each bottleneck. I started with releasing material two weeks before it was due at the bottleneck. Then it turned out that that’s too much, so I cut it to one week and everything was okay. Now it’s not okay.”

Compare this conversation from Rogo’s team to the conversations they had in the first chapter. This is a much more educated team. Leaders build competent, engaged teams.

P324 – “If the upstream resources don’t have spare capacity, we won’t be able to utilize even one single resource to the maximum; starvation will preclude it.”

P325 – “We took more orders, which by themselves didn’t turn any resource into a new bottleneck, but they did drastically reduce the amount of spare capacity on the non-bottlenecks, and we didn’t compensate with increased inventory in front of the bottleneck.”

P326 – “It’s obvious who is the boss now.”

Bob Donovan is stepping in to his leadership role and Rogo is not getting in his way.